I did not recognize a damn thing that either Peyton Manning or Justin Timberlake said in this commercial. I know my Chinese is very rusty (it has been twenty years since I lived in-country), but not that rusty!

Below is the ad:

For the record, my favorite fish-out-water American celebrity speaking Chinese of all time is Sigourney Weaver in the 1986 movie Half Moon Street, based on the Paul Theroux novelette Doctor Slaughter. If I remember correctly, the line she speaks is, “No (emphatic)! I worked at the US embassy.” (The line is only in the movie, not in the book.) It’s quite understandable, if somewhat mangled, and the look on her face is priceless.

As discussed, the problem comes from several angles:

• Who is going to judge for the award? While we may have a few individuals competent to judge three, four or five languages, most big titles are now being translated into ten or more languages.
• If we choose to offer the award only for one title in one language (i.e., the German edition of Bioshock), we still need to compare different languages. Since this is always going to be a subjective judgment, who is going to decide?

The other option is to create a Wall of Shame, aka “All your base are belong to us.” This is a much easier process, since most fluent speakers can easily spot a bad translation. The Far East Economic Review had a favorite feature of signs written in bad English from India to the Philippines.

Either of these, the Award or the Wall of Shame, is subject to some political pressure. Any individual or agency will occasionally let loose with a ringer, which can be shown to all the world. If you look carefully enough, you are sure to find some which were penned by your worst enemy.

What an outrage! Americans don’t understand other languages! We’ve known this for years! What’s your (or, rather, since I am an American and proud of it) our problem?!

As translators, let’s try to take this problem apart. How wrong is the translation? Is it completely off-the-mark, or is there a misunderstanding somewhere?

First of all, it should be pointed out that the word is not even in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. This is clearly not intended to be a serious piece of work, just a throw-away media piece. The target translation is to create the same meaning in Russian as the word “RESET” does in English, as applied to videogames, stop watches and computers. The word actually used was “ПЕРЕГРУЗКА”, which has a normal meaning of ‘overcharge’ (as in overcharge a battery) or ‘overload’. It also has a lesser meaning of ‘reset’ when used as a programming term.

The word that would best be used here is clearly “ПЕРЕЗАГРУЗКА”. The difference here is only two letters.

Members of our Russian team came back with a couple of possible explanations:

• The translator was not given sufficient context for the translation. If the translator thought this was for a specialized software programming application, he/she might have unintentionally used this word.
• There is a slight chance that this was a manufacturing error. If the designer of the button saw the there was not enough space for the real translation, he/she might have looked in a dictionary or online for a variant and found the incorrect word. Incidentally, Russian-English and English-Russian dictionaries are INFAMOUSLY inconsistent or outright wrong on many words. I had a Russian professor who could tell exactly which dictionary you had used on your homework by your word choice.

One thing everyone agrees is that no one reviewed Hillary’s translation. It was done by one person, and then never reviewed by a qualified native speaker of Russian. All translations need to be reviewed, it’s that simple. Particularly when it’s important.

Is this an apocryphal story of American understanding of foreign languages? I think so. It is true that fewer Americans than Europeans speak second languages, but this is common in large countries where people rarely meet people who speak different languages. Russia and China are other typical examples.

In fact, if one counts by absolute numbers of foreign language speakers, I imagine the US has the largest number given its extremely large number of immigrants. 33 million people living in the US are foreign born, according to official accounts (which are probably undercounting). More than 25% of the official population of California was born outside of the US.

In my mind, I imagine the problem has more to do with the insular nature of high office in the State Department. The State Department (along with the NSA, Defense and the CIA – in roughly that order) is one of the premiere posts for language experts in the US. I imagine that the upper offices at Foggy Bottom (as the State Department is known) decided to bypass their world-class translation offices and just gave this to a friend who spoke Russian as a second language. It shows.

(Thanks to Nikita, Alex and Sergey for their help with this post.)

Why?

Imagine a bad translator (who is not aware of quite how bad he is). And he’s awful. He lies about his native language, where he is living, who he has worked for in the past, but THAT SHOULD NOT MATTER. Because he is THE ONE – the great intelligent translator who knows all and sees all. Yes, you’ll get that translation back a week late, but it’s HIS and you should be happy for it. Even though all of the declensions are wrong. After all, this is a minor matter compared to his genius. If you run a translation agency, you can name at least three people whom this describes.

He asks for a review. We have three options:

1) Honesty. We tell the world how bad he is. All agencies have their own way of filtering translators, so this information does not really help them. The information is devastating to the translator, who thought he was simply excellent (why else did he ask for a review?). He writes a bad review right back at us, pretending to be that-big-client-everyone-wants, and gets his slimy bad-translator friends to do the same. Suddenly, we’re in an internet pissing fight which has done no one any good and, here is the key, has done Apogee Communications a world of bad. Let me repeat: no good for anyone, bad for us.

2) Lie. This really bad translator gets a good review from Apogee. He shows it to the world, saying what a great translator he is, and that he’s done a world of good for Apogee, videogames and Mom’s apple pie. Some less-then-careful agency hires him in the future and loses their big client over the bad translator’s work. This less-than-careful agency then goes online to explain his unfortunate demise due to hiring Apogee’s translators. Again, the key here is that it is bad for Apogee.

3) We can refuse to review. This is OK as long as we refuse to review EVERYONE. If the bad translator sees that we’ve reviewed good translators (as he will surely look for, since he’s wondering why no one has reviewed him publicly), he’ll ask WHY THE F**K WE DON’T REVIEW HIM. See possibilities 1 and 2 above. Again, not good for us UNLESS we refuse all public reviews.

We do offer private reviews for our translators if they need a reference. This is a professional courtesy, and it should come naturally to everyone in the industry who struggles with good and bad translators on a daily basis.